Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

*This event has been cancelled.*

As part of the Languages, Literatures, and Cultures 2019-2020 Speaker Series: Print, Power, and Parable in Japanese Literature, Gusdtav Heldt of University of Virginia will present this talk.

For centuries after its initial articulation in the Kokinshū anthology, the waka tradition asserted it began with the god Susa-no-o’s song at Izumo. At the same time, this claim to authority was contingent on a longstanding consensus that Japan’s “age of the gods” in general and its songs in particular were constantly open to reinscription. This paper will trace the multiple and occasionally conflicting myths of waka poetry’s origins in the prefaces to the first imperial anthology and its interpolated commentary while considering how these narratives can be further fleshed out by attention to the surviving corpus of song-texts from the age of the gods that are included in the mytho-histories Nihon shoki and Kojiki.

This event is sponsored by the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures; Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (Rothman Endowment); Japan Foundation; and the Asian Studies Development Fund.

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